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Two weeks ago I sent Hasselblad support a question I thought had a one-line answer. I know, I know, I should know better...
08/29/2026

Two weeks ago I sent Hasselblad support a question I thought had a one-line answer. I know, I know, I should know better than that by now, right?

But I digress...

Let's get back on topic: when Phocus for Mac and Phocus Mobile render the same RAW file differently, which one is the real HNCS? Twelve days, two support cases, and three engineering replies later, I have an answer of sorts. But it didn't resolve the question. It dismantled it.

Along the way, that answer proved a claim I published in early August wrong. So this post is two things: the clearest definition of HNCS Hasselblad has ever put in writing, as far as I know, and a retraction.

💡A note on support: This post represents my personal exploration and testing, not official technical support or guidance from Hasselblad. If you need assistance with your Hasselblad equipment, please contact Hasselblad directly: [email protected] for global support, [email protected] for the Americas, or visit hasselblad.com/support for regional options.

Key finding: According to Hasselblad engineering (August 2026), HNCS is applied to every RAW render in both Phocus for Mac and Phocus Mobile, as an internal processing stage linked to white balance. No preset or import state "is" HNCS. My 9 August claim that default Mac imports aren't HNCS is therefore retracted; the measured gap is vignetting correction.

One RAW file, two Hasselblad apps, two different pictures

The question came out of the import preset investigation. Quick recap for anyone joining late: Phocus for Mac, in its default configuration, does not apply the Adjustment preset you pick in the Import dialog. Every image lands in an as-imported state the toolbar calls "3FR" (the color processing is all there; what is missing is most of the lens vignetting correction, so the corners sit darker), and it stays that way in every export until/if you apply a preset yourself. Phocus Mobile on the iPad offers no preset choices at all, and its one and only render matches the Mac's Standard preset almost exactly, roughly fifty times closer than it sits to the Mac's default import state.

Same file, same company, two different default pictures, about ten percent of full scale apart. I naively assumed that surely one of them had to be the real HNCS rendering that the marketing promises? Hasselblad themselves describe HNCS as a color system that runs "from the initial capture to post-editing"¹ and removes the need to fiddle with profiles. Well, OK then! Which of your two renders is it then?

On 7 August I put that question to Hasselblad support, with the measurements attached.

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Hasselblad's first answer: crop settings

The engineering reply arrived on 14 August:

Both are valid HNCS renderings. Phocus includes 5 factory preset adjustment templates. Users can select the appropriate template based on their scenario, then make fine adjustments. [...] "3FR" represents the embedded adjustment scheme within your 3FR file. It has the same basic settings as "Standard," but includes additional crop settings.

"Both are valid HNCS renderings" should have been the first hint of where this would end up, but I was more than a little confused by the second half. Crop settings cannot be the explanation for what I measured mostly because none of the test images was ever cropped. All three exports, Mac default, Mac Standard, and the iPad's render, are 11656 x 8742 pixels.

And a crop does not change the value of a single pixel anyway; it changes which pixels you keep, as I had to explain to Hasselblad Engineering. The difference I measured is radial, strongest in the corners, which is the signature of lens falloff correction, and it shows up on every uncropped frame I tested.

So I wrote back the same day and posed the problem as a fork. Phocus Mobile has no preset selector. It produces exactly one rendering, and that rendering matches the Mac's Standard preset. So, either Standard is the HNCS rendering and the Mac's default import state is not, or Phocus Mobile cannot produce HNCS at all, which would be its own defect. I attached the RAW file, all three exports, and checksums, and asked them to pick a branch.

The same answer came back on a different case

While that rebuttal sat with engineering, my separate bug case about the import preset behavior got its own engineering reply. It contained the same crop explanation(!!!), in slightly different words, with no sign anyone had read the rebuttal filed three days earlier on the other case.

I would like to say this surprised me. The first time I asked Hasselblad what the "Use embedded if available" checkbox actually does was last November. That reply asked me for a screen recording, and the thread went quiet. The checkbox that decides whether your chosen preset gets applied at all appears nowhere in the official Phocus manual, which still only documents the software up to version 3.8. Nine months of asking, and the closest thing to documentation is still a support thread.

Then something approximating a real answer landed.

Have you seen the guide? I've published Essential Phocus 4.x for Mac - 85 topics across 8 sections and 250 pages covering everything from HNCS color science to HDR workflows. It's the reference manual Hasselblad hasn't updated since 3.8. It's $49, and updates are included.

Get it here

What is HNCS, according to Hasselblad?

According to Hasselblad Engineering, HNCS is a processing stage that both Phocus apps apply to every RAW render. Always. That is the answer that arrived on 19 August, this time from their engineering team after they had "reviewed your findings and measurements again carefully." Quoted in full:

Both Phocus and Phocus Mobile apply HNCS when processing RAW images. HNCS takes effect during the intermediate stages of image processing and is strongly linked to white balance parameters. Since different presets utilize different white balance parameters, this is the primary factor influencing the visual outcome of HNCS. Other post-processing adjustments, such as vignetting or tone curves, do not affect the HNCS processing currently applied to the photo.

Read that twice, because it quietly redefines the thing photographers argue about in forum threads. HNCS is a stage inside the rendering engine. Every RAW file passes through it, in both apps, every time. You cannot turn it off, you cannot select it, and you cannot point at a render and say "that one is HNCS." The as-imported state? HNCS. Standard? HNCS. The iPad's render? HNCS. Asking which render is the real HNCS turns out to be like asking which cup of coffee is the real water.

The presets sit on top of that stage, and per Hasselblad the main way they influence its visible outcome is through white balance. Vignetting and tone curves sit outside it entirely.

And to give credit where credit is due, this definition agrees with my own measurements better than my original interpretation of them did. When I isolated the mechanism on 11 August, the as-imported state and Standard turned out to share one identical color pipeline. The entire visible difference between them, byte for byte, is the Lens Corrections Vignetting slider moving to 100. A lens correction. The exact category Hasselblad now says lives outside HNCS. Their definition and my toggle test are two independent descriptions of the same pipeline, and they fit.

The crop explanation from the earlier replies was not mentioned again because I requested they refrain from diversionary tactics.

The retraction

On 9 August I published a post titled "Phocus for Mac Imports Aren't HNCS by Default. Neither Are Your Exports." Under Hasselblad's definition, that title was wrong, and so was the claim it stood on: that a render without the preset applied is a render without Hasselblad's color science. Every one of those exports carried HNCS. Every render Phocus has ever shown me carried HNCS. What the default import flow withholds is a lens falloff correction.

The measurements in that post were right, and every one of them still stands. The interpretation was mine, and it overreached. The post has been corrected in place with dated updates, and its title no longer makes the HNCS claim. I am also re-checking the wording in the HNCS explainer and the .phos teardown against this definition, and will note any corrections there the same way.

The lesson is one I have preached here before and then failed to follow myself: pixels beat labels. I proved with checksums that the pixels differed, then reached for a label the pixels never claimed. In my defense, if they'd just have documented all this in the first place we wouldn't be here.

For completeness, Hasselblad also confirmed the behavior that started all this. The default import flow skipping your selected preset is, in their words, "expected behavior." As is the checkbox re-ticking itself every time Phocus restarts. None of it is a bug in their eyes, which makes the practical advice below permanent rather than a workaround.

What does this settle, and what stays open?

Settled: the community had the shape of this right years ago. A Luminous Landscape analysis from 2015² modeled HNCS as white-balance-driven color transforms selected per illuminant, and "strongly linked to white balance parameters" is the first time Hasselblad has confirmed that link in writing, as far as I know. Settled too: preset differences are adjustments layered on one shared color pipeline, which is exactly what the .phos sidecar teardown found when it diffed the factory presets.

Open: one detail of Hasselblad's answer does not, however, line up with that same teardown. They say different presets "utilize different white balance parameters" as the primary factor. The sidecar diffs across all five factory presets found sharpening and tone curve changes, and no white balance delta at all. Maybe presets pass the as-shot white balance through rather than setting their own. Maybe the answer describes a layer the sidecar never records?

Alas, also still open, and unmoved by any definition so far: the same RAW file still produces two visibly different default renders depending on whether you open it on a Mac or an iPad, up to 18 percent apart in the corners on my test frames. Both are HNCS. Both are intentional. Neither app tells you the other one disagrees, and outside of these support threads, nothing in writing says so either.

The practical rule survives every redefinition unchanged: untick "Use embedded if available" when you import, or apply your preset afterwards with the Adjustments dropdown or Modify. That gets your Mac the same corrected render the iPad produces without being asked.

Which leaves the question I should have sent on 7 August, and which is now sitting with Hasselblad on the still-open bug case: if every render is HNCS, why does Phocus for Mac default to withholding a lens correction that Phocus Mobile applies to every single image? When that answer arrives, I'll be sure to update you all right here.

References

1. Hasselblad, "Hasselblad Natural Colour Solution": hasselblad.com/learn/hasselblad-natural-colour-solution
2. Luminous Landscape Forums, "Hasselblad Natural Color Solution (HNCS) - how it works (probably)": forum.luminous-landscape.com

Hasselblad engineering defines HNCS: an always-on stage in every Phocus render. What my earlier claim got wrong, and what the gap really is.

You shoot a high-contrast scene in HDR mode. The X2D II's screen shows a clean capture: highlights intact, histogram com...
08/22/2026

You shoot a high-contrast scene in HDR mode. The X2D II's screen shows a clean capture: highlights intact, histogram comfortable. Then you open the same file in Phocus 4.2 and it renders darker, with a different histogram and cyan clipping warnings that don't line up with what the camera showed you. The first instinct is that something broke: the metering, the file, or Phocus itself.

Nothing broke. A reader (who had posted the same findings in a DPReview thread¹) wrote to me with exactly this, and his framing was better than most: he'd stopped trusting Smart Metering because record mode, playback, and Phocus all showed him something different, and with the camera in HDR mode he couldn't spot-meter his way out. Both observations are correct. The fix isn't a setting; it's knowing which of the three pictures is the file.

💡A note on support: This post represents my personal exploration and testing, not official technical support or guidance from Hasselblad. If you need assistance with your Hasselblad equipment, please contact Hasselblad directly: [email protected] for global support, [email protected] for the Americas, or visit hasselblad.com/support for regional options.

Key finding: The X2D II's live view, in-camera playback, and Phocus 4.2 are three different renders of one RAW, and only Phocus renders the actual file. HDR mode's forced Smart Metering deliberately holds exposure back by up to ~2.5 stops to protect highlights, so Phocus's darker render is the real, intended exposure.

Why do record mode, playback, and Phocus all disagree?

Because you are not looking at one image three times. You are looking at three renders built for three different jobs:

* Record mode (live view) is built for composing and focusing. It doesn't always track your exposure.
* Playback shows the camera's processed preview, tone-mapped to look good on the built-in screen. Its blinking clip warning reads from that preview too, which is why it can disagree with Phocus about what clipped.
* Phocus renders the RAW itself through Hasselblad's color pipeline. This is the only one of the three that shows you the file.

When my reader took the question to Hasselblad support, their answer (posted in full in the thread¹) was a compressed version of the same point: "The camera renders a preview as opposed to displaying the full RAW file which you will see in Phocus." That's correct, but it leaves out the two mechanisms that make the previews diverge, and those mechanisms are where the confusion actually lives.

What record mode is really showing you

The live view image is governed by a setting you may never have opened: Exposure Simulation, under Main Menu > Exposure Settings, not under Display where you'd expect it (X2D II manual, section 3.2). When simulation is active for your shooting mode, live view tracks the exposure you've dialed. When it isn't, the screen shows a brightness-optimized preview instead, built so you can compose and focus, not so you can judge exposure.

Two behaviors compound this. The manual states that Exposure Simulation is automatically deactivated while autofocus is analyzing the subject, then reactivated after focus completes. In practice: the display brightens during your half-press, exactly when you're looking hardest at it. And the setting is scoped by exposure mode (the manual's options are "A/S/P/Auto" or "A/S/P/Auto/M"), so depending on how it's configured, an entire mode's live view may never reflect your dialed exposure at all.

So record mode can genuinely look brighter than the exposure being set. Playback then shows the captured result without the composition aid, which reads as "the image got darker between record and play." No metering changed. Only the rendering did.

Have you seen the guide? I've published Essential Phocus 4.x for Mac - 85 topics across 8 sections and 246 pages covering everything from HNCS color science to HDR workflows. It's the reference manual Hasselblad hasn't updated since 3.8. It's $49, and updates are included.

Get it here

Phocus is darker because the metering did its job

With HDR output enabled, the X2D II locks metering to Smart Metering and removes Spot, Centre Spot, and Centre Weighted entirely. That's not a bug my reader hit; it's how the camera works, and it's documented behavior (manual sections 2.4 and 2.7). In high-contrast scenes, HDR Smart Metering pulls exposure back from a neutral reading by up to about 2.5 stops, specifically to keep highlights from clipping. I covered why that trade is the right one for this sensor in the highlight-metering post: shadow recovery on a 15.3-stop sensor is essentially free, and clipped highlights are gone for good.

The camera's playback preview is built to look pleasant on the 1400-nit screen, so you never really see that deliberate underexposure in the field. Phocus doesn't extend the same courtesy. It renders the RAW as metered, which means the darker image in Phocus is not a rendering error. It's the first honest look at the exposure the camera chose on purpose. The cyan marks are Phocus's Highlight Warning tool (a toggle, ⌃⇧H, light cyan by default) flagging what its current render treats as clipped, and that brings us to the checkbox.

Unchecking HDR in Phocus doesn't remove clipping. It hides headroom.

My reader noticed that turning the HDR checkbox off in Phocus made the clipping warnings shrink, which made HDR mode look like the culprit, as if the HDR render were boosting highlights into clipping. It's the other way around.

With HDR unchecked, Phocus maps the whole file into the standard SDR range. The brightest tones get compressed toward white, the histogram fits neatly inside the familiar 0-255 view, and values that actually extend beyond SDR white get squeezed together at the right edge, where the clip indicator treats them as one undifferentiated "clipped" mass. With HDR checked, those same tones spread out into the extended range above SDR white, where the histogram's gray capability zone shows them as what they are: recorded highlight data your display may or may not be able to preview. The RAW held that range the whole time. The checkbox only decides whether Phocus shows it to you.

Phocus also has a second, separate highlight tool worth keeping distinct here: the HDR Warning overlay (View > HDR Warning). Its yellow and red regions map your display's headroom, not the file's data. Red means "your screen can't preview this tone right now," not "this tone is clipped in the file." Treating that overlay as a clipping indicator is the fastest way to talk yourself into pulling down highlights that were fine.

The Mac brightness trap

One more layer catches people who check their files on an HDR-capable Mac and still see more clipping than the camera showed: a Mac's HDR headroom is not fixed. macOS adapts it to display brightness and ambient light, so at normal working brightness you are usually not getting the display's full HDR range.

Hasselblad's own advice is to lower monitor brightness for HDR work, and you can watch the mechanism directly: with the Phocus histogram open on an HDR file, drop your display brightness a few notches and the gray HDR capability zone expands to the right. Highlights that looked clipped at full brightness start showing recoverable detail. I walked through the full histogram workflow, including this behavior, in Part 3 of the HDR series, and Part 4 covers which displays have meaningful headroom to give.

How do you expose for HDR when you can't spot meter?

That's the mechanics. Here is the practical answer to my reader's direct question, "how do you adjust exposure in HDR mode," in the two workflows that actually work.

Option 1: let Smart Metering do the job it already does. HDR mode's forced metering is doing precisely what you would reach for spot metering to do: holding the histogram off the right wall. In high-contrast scenes it protects highlights by design, and the RAW almost always carries more highlight detail than the camera preview suggests. Shoot, then treat the Phocus render as ground truth and lift shadows there. On this sensor, that lift is clean.

Option 2: take manual control back by leaving HDR mode off at capture. Turn HDR output off and Spot metering returns. Meter the highlight you care about, lock it with AE-L, recompose, shoot. Then enable HDR in Phocus afterward. The in-camera HDR toggle changes the preview, the metering, and the JPEG sidecar, and it never touches the RAW, so you lose exactly nothing by metering in SDR and going HDR in post. I covered the toggle's real scope in the RAW+JPG post.

The four combinations of camera HDR mode and the Phocus HDR checkbox reduce to a simpler table than the menus suggest:

Camera HDR
Phocus HDR checkbox
What you get

On
Checked
Smart Metering's highlight-protective exposure; extended-range render showing the full headroom

On
Unchecked
Same protective exposure; SDR render that compresses highlights and over-reports clipping

Off
Checked
Your own metering (Spot available); extended-range render of the same full RAW

Off
Unchecked
Your own metering; SDR render

The RAW in every row is a complete, full-range capture. The camera setting changes how the exposure gets metered and what preview you see; the Phocus checkbox changes how much of the captured range the render shows you. One precondition the table leaves implicit: the two camera-HDR-on rows require a mode where the toggle exists at all, meaning a JPEG- or HEIF-inclusive image format, single-shot drive, and a non-Manual exposure mode. The full grayed-out list is in the RAW+JPG post linked above.

What to change in practice

Treat the camera's screen as a framing tool and the Phocus render as the exposure reference. The preview is built to look clean, not to report the data.

Before judging highlights in Phocus on a Mac, drop your display brightness and watch the histogram's gray zone open up. Full working brightness silently costs you HDR preview range.

And when a scene demands precise highlight placement, don't fight Smart Metering for control it won't give you. Switch HDR off, spot meter, lock, shoot. Check the HDR box in Phocus when you get home. The only way to lose that headroom is to forget the checkbox.

References

1. DPReview forum thread, "Problem w clipping on X2D2", the public version of the reader findings this post responds to.
2. Hasselblad X2D II 100C User Manual v1.0, sections 2.7 ("HDR Function") and 3.2 ("Exposure Settings" / Exposure Simulation), available from Hasselblad's support downloads.

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X2D II HDR shots look clean on camera, then clip in Phocus 4.2. Why live view, playback, and Phocus disagree, and how to expose for HDR.

Hasselblad released Phocus 4.2.2 for Mac on August 20th, five weeks after 4.2.1. The build is on their CDN and in the do...
08/21/2026

Hasselblad released Phocus 4.2.2 for Mac on August 20th, five weeks after 4.2.1. The build is on their CDN and in the downloads API that feeds their website, which is where my release monitor picked it up just before midnight Eastern.

* Direct download: Phocus_4.2.2_Mac.dmg (748 MB)
* Release notes: Phocus-Mac-read-me.pdf

This time there is an actual changelog. Seven lines of it. That is a step up from the eleven words that accompanied 4.2.1, and two of the seven lines are about HEIF, which is the format Hasselblad's whole HDR story depends on. I installed it this morning and have had it open for less than an hour, so this is the read-me, a bundle diff, and first impressions.

💡A note on support: This post represents my personal exploration and testing, not official technical support or guidance from Hasselblad. If you need assistance with your Hasselblad equipment, please contact Hasselblad directly: [email protected] for global support, [email protected] for the Americas, or visit hasselblad.com/support for regional options.

Key finding: Phocus 4.2.2 for Mac (August 20, 2026) lists seven changes: in-app language switching, Ctrl + scroll smooth zoom, full editing of re-imported HEIF exports, batch import work, smoother thumbnail browsing, faster Exposure V1 adjustments, and a second-HEIF-export fix. The bundle diff adds an undisclosed in-app update downloader.

What Phocus 4.2.2 Changes, According to Hasselblad

The read-me that ships with 4.2.2 is the 4.2.1 read-me with the heading changed, the date changed from July 15th to August 20th, and one block added under the changelog. The document went from 1,488 words to 1,546. Here is the block, verbatim:

* Support in-app language switching
* Support smooth zoom with Ctrl + mouse scroll wheel
* Support full editing for re-imported exported HEIF files
* Optimized experience for batch import and batch modification
* Improved image switching smoothness when browsing thumbnails only
* Optimized image adjustment performance for Exposure V1 gears
* Fixed issue causing failure on second HEIF export
* Fixed other known issues

Everything above that block is unchanged. The "New features in 4.2" section still describes the redesigned Output Presets dialog, the brush mask eraser, negative Highlight Recovery and Shadow Fill values, and the update notification system. Those shipped in June. If you skim the PDF it still reads like a feature release, and it still is not one.

I keep a running comparison of every 4.x read-me against what testing shows actually shipped on the release notes ledger. 4.2.2 gets its entry there once I have been through the build.

Researching and writing the blog and page posts I produce takes up a lot of my time and costs me money for software subscriptions, tooling, and other incidentals related to running a business.

Please consider a paid membership to help me keep the lights on and pay the bills - it is only a fraction of the cost of an X2D II and a lens. Click on the button to go to the membership page to see the options available.

Support the blog.

The Two HEIF Lines Are the Ones That Matter

If you shoot an X2D II and export HDR, the HEIF lines are the two that touch your workflow.

"Support full editing for re-imported exported HEIF files." The wording implies that the tool set you got on a re-imported Phocus HEIF was restricted until now, and that 4.2.2 lifts the restriction. It does not say which tools were missing. That is the first thing I will check: export an HDR HEIF from a 3FR, re-import it, and compare the Adjust panel against what 4.2.1 offered on the same file.

"Fixed issue causing failure on second HEIF export." That one is a straight bug fix, and it is not a bug anyone has reported to me. The phrasing suggests the first HEIF export in a session worked and the second one failed. If you hit that in 4.2 or 4.2.1 and worked around it by relaunching, this is your fix. If you have more detail on when it triggered, I would like to hear it, because I want to confirm the fix rather than take the read-me's word for it.

HDR HEIF is the delivery format Hasselblad pushes hardest for the X2D II, and it has had the least stable export path through 4.x. Phocus 4.2 fixed the 4.1.2 export dimension cap that silently shrank every HEIF, and 4.2 itself claimed "improved highlights for exported HDR HEIF / UltraHDR images". Two more HEIF fixes in 4.2.2 says the format is still getting engineering attention, and still needs it.

In-App Language Switching and Ctrl + Scroll Zoom

Ctrl + mouse scroll wheel now zooms smoothly in the Viewer. Phocus already had stepped zoom and the one-click zoom controls from 4.0. Smooth scroll zoom is what anyone coming from Capture One or Lightroom reaches for first. Trackpad pinch zoom is also smooth in 4.2.2 and works without selecting the Zoom tool. I cannot say for certain that it did not before; the pinch handler exists in the 4.2.1 binary too, and the changelog says nothing about it, but it did not feel like this in 4.2.1.

Language switching moves the UI language into the app instead of leaving it to the macOS system language. It takes effect after a relaunch (the bundle diff below has the evidence).

Neither feature is documented anywhere except this changelog line. The Phocus manual still stops at 3.8.

Performance Lines: Batch, Thumbnails, and Exposure V1

Performance claims are the hardest part of a read-me to verify, because there are never numbers.

Batch import and batch modification. "Optimized experience" could mean anything from a progress bar to a rewritten import path. Given that 4.2's import is the release that started rewriting the EXIF Model tag on every imported 3FR, the import path is where I will be looking hardest.

Thumbnail-only browsing. 4.2.1 introduced a persistent thumbnail cache that did not exist in 4.2 (a 5 GiB disk tier plus an in-memory tier, described in six words in that release's read-me). "Improved image switching smoothness when browsing thumbnails only" reads like a follow-on to that work. The browser was already noticeably quicker in 4.2.1. This build moves it a long way further: scrolling and arrowing through a folder of 3FRs in thumbnail view is, anecdotally and after ten minutes, the fastest Phocus has ever felt on my Mac, to the point where browsing stops being the part of the app you put up with. I have no measurements yet, and that is the first thing I will put numbers on.

Exposure V1. The read-me says "Optimized image adjustment performance for Exposure V1 gears". "Gears" is almost certainly a translation artifact. Exposure V1 is the oldest of the four algorithm versions the Exposure tool can run, kept for compatibility so that images edited in early Phocus versions render the same way when reopened. V4 is the default for anything imported into Phocus 4.x and the only version that supports the HDR pipeline. So this line matters if you have a large archive with old sidecars, and not otherwise. The version selector and what each one changes are covered in the Phocus guide.

Have you seen the guide? I've published Essential Phocus 4.x for Mac - 85 topics across 8 sections and 250 pages covering everything from HNCS color science to HDR workflows. It's the reference manual Hasselblad hasn't updated since 3.8. It's $49, and updates are included.

Get it here

Which Known Issues Does Phocus 4.2.2 Fix?

The read-me does not say. "Fixed other known issues" is back, and as with 4.2.1 it names none of them. These are the open problems I track that 4.2.2 does not name:

* Import rewrites the EXIF Model tag. Since 4.2, every 3FR that passes through Phocus import has its camera model string rewritten, which breaks DxO PureRaw on those files. Hasselblad has a support case on it. "Optimized experience for batch import" is the line that might touch this, or might not. That retest is next.
* Import adjustment presets are not applied. The correction I published on 4.2 stands: the preset you pick at import is not what ends up on the file. Hasselblad has a case open on that too.
* HNNR output filenames get a spurious numeric suffix. Hasselblad said it was investigating in April. Still present in 4.2.
* Import over SMB blocks the main thread. Engineering confirmed this one and queued it for a future release. Nothing in the read-me suggests this is that release.

All four are in the Known Issues tracker with reproduction steps and case history, and each will get a 4.2.2 status line once retested.

What the Read-Me Does Not Say: The Bundle Diff

I compared the 4.2.2 application bundle against 4.2.1 file by file before installing. Of 1,309 files, 103 changed and 1,116 are identical. The framework list is the same. The signing identity, entitlements, and notarization are the same. Most of the changes are small. These are not.

Phocus can now download its own updates. The 4.2 update notification was a dialog with a button that sent you to the website. The 4.2.2 string table for that dialog grew from 7 entries to 19, and the new ones are "Downloading Phocus Update", a percentage progress string, "Download complete", "Download failed", "Retry", and "Download verification failed". That is an in-app download-and-verify flow, and it is not in the changelog. I will confirm how it behaves the next time Hasselblad ships something.

The language switch is real and needs a relaunch. The main binary gains a SelectedApplicationLanguage preference and a "restart now / later" prompt that did not exist in 4.2.1. No new language bundles were added; the same eleven localizations ship as before, so this is a switch between the existing translations, not new ones.

The lens correction maps and colour tables have lost their names. Phocus ships 59 per-lens geometric correction maps and 26 sensor colour tables inside two of its frameworks. Through 4.1.1 those were readable XML files with readable names (GMapXCD38.xml, LUTTable100MP.xml). 4.1.2 made the contents opaque, same names, same sizes plus 20 bytes, and nobody mentioned that either. In 4.2.2 the names are gone too: every one of the 85 files is now a random twenty-character .dat, and the two frameworks that read them gained the strings "white-box decrypted" and "plaintext fallback". I read that as Hasselblad tightening the encryption on its calibration data and removing the last clue about which file belongs to which lens. I have not decompiled the loader, so treat the mechanism as an inference; the rename and the new strings are facts you can check yourself with find and strings.

None of that affects how your files render. It does affect anyone trying to study how Hasselblad's lens corrections and colour science work from the outside, which is a subject I write about, and it tells you something about where Hasselblad's engineering attention went in a five-week point release.

There is also a third neural denoise bundle, PBNeuralNetworkDeNoise_MLDenoise.bundle, sitting next to the two that shipped before, built against the macOS 26.1 SDK. The existing two are unchanged. I do not know what model it carries or whether HNNR output differs, and I will test whether it does.

Ctrl + scroll zoom, the HEIF re-import change, and the batch import work left no new strings I could find. That does not mean they are absent; it means they are implemented inside code paths that already existed, and the only way to check them is to use the app.

Should You Update to Phocus 4.2.2?

That, as usual, depends on your appetite for risk, but this time I lean yes, and not for the HEIF lines. The browsing speed alone makes 4.2.2 worth installing; it changes how the app feels to work in, and that is before anyone has measured it. The HEIF fixes are a bonus if they hold up. Point releases in the 4.x line have been low risk with one exception, 4.1.2, which shipped two regressions that took a full release to undo, so I still want a day or two of use before calling it clean.

The one group that should wait is anyone whose workflow depends on the EXIF Model tag surviving import (DxO PureRaw, or anything else that reads the camera model to pick a profile). Nothing in this read-me says that behaviour changed, and the retest is next.

Going back is easier than it sounds. Phocus has no downgrade button, but downloading the previous installer and installing it over the new version works. Every 4.x build is still on Hasselblad's CDN; the version history has the links.

4.2.2 is installed. The retest results go into the Known Issues tracker and the ledger as they land, and if anything in this build turns out to be bigger than seven lines, it gets its own post.

References

1. Phocus 4.2.2 Mac read-me (PDF), Hasselblad CDN
2. Phocus 4.2.1 Mac read-me (PDF), Hasselblad CDN
3. Phocus 4.2.2 for Mac installer, Hasselblad CDN

Phocus 4.2.2 for Mac shipped August 20. Seven changelog lines: two HEIF fixes, language switching, smooth zoom, and the open bugs it skips.

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